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Last month The Globe and Mail published a three part investigative series “Licensed to Bill”, describing a systemic problem with how injury claims are settled in public and private auto insurance markets in Canada. Insurers are eager for systemic change,…

If we expect to make any progress on the natural disaster risk reduction front, we are going to have to come to a few understandings. Here are just a few of the things we will have to make peace with:…

If you are an insurer, ask yourself this question: Are your customers sharing data with you? (If you aren’t you probably are customer of insurance, so just ask it the other way around.) Most likely, the answer is “not if they don’t have to”. Why is that the case? Is it generally privacy concern? Don’t […]

Every once in a while, a unique or particularly severe insured loss event or series of events forces (re)insurers to re-evaluate the assumptions they make about the risks they take onto their balance sheets. This is usually either because something…

Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida on August 23 and 24, 1992 – and changed the insurance industry forever. This article was first published in the October 1999 issue of Swiss Re Canada’s ‘review’, a popular monthly technical reinsurance newsletter…

Return period calculations placed in the hands of those who don’t know what they are or how they work can be dangerous things. Take the storm in Saskatoon July 10. A reporter for Global News wrote: “Torrential rain and hail…

The recent flooding in Ottawa, Gatineau, Laval and other places brought four main issues to the fore. First, is the matter of buying out homeowners located in the floodway, the 1 in 20 flood plain. Second, is the need to…

Critical thinking is key to success in today’s knowledge-based economy. Good, creative thinking and clear analysis can be the difference between a huge commercial success and a business venture doomed to extinction. Elaine Pohl of SGI Canada honed her critical…

New Year always gives me a feeling of good cheer and optimism. As president and CEO of the Institute, good cheer comes from celebrating the effort of thousands of insurance professionals across Canada who pursued an insurance education in 2016.…

Brokers are very busy people these days. This is due to all kinds of new insurance products designed to stay on top of consumers’ changing needs. Choice is good for the consumer. It’s good for brokers, too. The wide variety…

Rick Tompkins, a suburban Toronto insurance broker, never considered a career in politics until a good friend, who happens to be the leader of the Conservative party, asks him to run for office. He accepts the offer, with the understanding that he would probably not win, but can use the opportunity to gain some visibility for himself and his business. Jerry Switzer, a veteran party worker, is sent in to guide Rick through a campaign in a riding that hasn’t elected a Conservative in years. Rick fumbles his way through the election campaign and manages a surprise win but at the expense of saddling his party with an impossible commitment. What makes matters worse, Rick is anything but politically correct. He offends everyone in his path and stumbles from one political scandal to another. Still, Rick has one saving asset: a political party machine that is able to spin scandals to its advantage.

A small city that wasn’t designed to burn was put up in the middle of the Boreal forest that was designed to burn. Are we simply going to put Fort McMurray back the way it was? Fortunately for insureds in…

ICLR has been successful in gaining official authorization to allow a noted wildfire researcher behind police cordons to investigate the resilience to wildfire of certain homes in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Alan Westhaver is looking into the reasons why clusters of…

Along with claiming a reported 49 lives (at time of posting), injuring thousands and causing between $1.7- and $2.9 billion in insured damage (according to AIR), the April 14 (UTC) 6.4Mw and April 15 (UTC) 7.0Mw earthquakes in Kumamoto, Japan…